He was never quite sure which happened first, the sudden halt of the elevator or the extinguishing of the lights, or whether the two events occurred at the same time, the brief sputtering of the fluorescent bulbs overhead and the violent lurch of the elevator car all around him, a hiss followed by a bang, a bang followed by a hiss, or a hiss and a bang together, but however it happened it happened fast, and within two seconds the lights had gone out and the elevator had stopped moving. Ferguson was stuck somewhere between the sixth and seventh floors, and there he would remain for the next thirteen and a half hours, alone in the dark with nothing to do but examine the thoughts in his head and hope the lights would come back on before his bladder failed him.
Right from the start, he understood that it wasn’t just his problem but everyone’s problem. People were shouting throughout the building—Blackout! Blackout! — and as far as Ferguson could tell, there was no panic in their voices, if anything the tone was exuberant and celebratory, an outrush of wild laughter was rising up through the elevator shaft and resounding against the walls of the car, the boring old routines had lost their purpose, something new and unexpected had fallen from the sky, a black comet was streaking across the city, and let’s have a party and whoop it up! That was good, Ferguson thought, and the longer the merriment went on, the more it would help him from panicking himself, for if no one else was afraid, why should he be afraid? — even though he was trapped inside a metal box and could see no more than the blindest blind man on a starless winter night at the North Pole, even though he felt as if he had been locked up in a coffin and might starve to death before he managed to crawl out.
Within two or three minutes, some of the more conscientious students started banging on the elevator doors and asking if anyone was inside. Yes! several voices answered, and Ferguson discovered he wasn’t the only unfortunate who had been stranded in midair, that both elevators were in fact occupied, but the other box had half a dozen people in it whereas Ferguson was alone, not only imprisoned as the others were but cast into solitary confinement, and when he yelled out his name and room number (1014B), a voice called back: Archie! You poor sucker! To which Ferguson replied: Tim! How long is it going to last? Tim’s answer was less than encouraging: Who the hell knows?
There was nothing to be done. He would have to sit there and wait it out, the bumbling Mr. Mishap who had been on his way to his girlfriend’s apartment when he was accidentally turned into Experiment Number 001, now confined to a sensory-deprivation tank suspended six and a half floors above ground, the Harry Houdini of the Ivy League, the Robinson Crusoe of New York City and the greater metropolitan area, and if it hadn’t felt so awful to be sealed up in that pitch-black cell, he would have laughed at himself and taken a bow for being the world’s number one comic dunce, the number one cosmic dunce.
He would have to pee in his pants, he decided. If and when it became necessary to empty his bladder, he would have to revert to the self-sopping practices of early toddlerhood rather than inundate the floor and find himself — for the next however many hours — sitting in a puddle of cold, sloshing urine.
No cigarettes, and no matches either. Smoking would have helped pass the time, and the matches would have allowed him to see something every now and then, not to speak of the glowing tips of the cigarettes each time he inhaled, but he had run out of both cigarettes and matches earlier that afternoon and had been intending to buy a new pack on his way down to dinner at Schneiderman’s Spaghetti House on West 111th Street. Dream on, funny man.
It was impossible to know if the telephones were still working, but on the off chance they were, he called out to Tim again, wanting to ask his roommate to contact Amy and tell her what had happened to him so she wouldn’t worry when he failed to show up at six, but Tim wasn’t there anymore, and when Ferguson called out this time, no one answered. The whoops and laughter had quieted down in the past few minutes, the crowds in the hallways had largely dispersed, and no doubt Tim had gone upstairs to smoke pot with his pothead friends on the tenth floor.
So dark in there, so disconnected from everything, so outside the world or what Ferguson had always imagined to be the world that it was slowly becoming possible to ask himself if he was still inside his own body.
He thought about the wristwatch his parents had given him for his sixth birthday, a small child’s watch with a flexible metallic band and numbers on the face that glowed in the dark. How comforting those green illuminated numbers had been to him as he lay in bed before sleep closed his eyes and pulled him under, little phosphorescent companions who disappeared in the morning when the sun came up, friends by night but mere painted numerals by day, and now that he no longer wore a watch, he wondered what had happened to that long-ago birthday present and where it could have gone to. Nothing to see anymore, and no sense of time anymore either, no way of knowing if he had been in the elevator for twenty or thirty minutes, or forty minutes, or an hour.
Gauloises. Those were the cigarettes he had been planning to buy on his walk down Broadway, the brand that he and Amy had started smoking during their trip to France in the summer, the overstrong, brown-tobacco fat boys in the pale blue packages with no cellophane around them, the cheapest of all French cigarettes, and merely to light up a Gauloise in America now was to return to the days and nights they had spent in that other world, the smells of the rough, cigar-like smoke were so different from the blond-tobacco smells of Camels and Luckys and Chesterfields that one puff, one exhale could send them back to chambre dix-huit in their little hotel across from the market, and suddenly their minds would be traveling through the Paris streets again as they relived the happiness they had felt there together, cigarettes as a sign of that happiness, of the new and bigger love that had taken hold of them during their month abroad and could express itself now by such acts as conjuring up surprise meetings with bawdy undergraduate poets as a gift to the newest member of the Morningside Heights Puke Battalion, blessed Amy and her talent for the unpredictable gesture, her lightning-fast improvisations, her resourceful, generous heart.
Ferguson had been tempted to take Les up on his offer and submit some of his work to the Columbia Review, but a month and a half had gone by since then, and he still hadn’t come around and knocked. Not that he would have given Les any of his recent poems, which had all been disappointments to him and didn’t deserve to be published, but the translations he had started doing in Paris had become a more serious enterprise by now, and after investing in several dictionaries that had helped improve his less than perfect French (Le Petit Robert, Le Petit Larousse Illustré, and the indispensable French-to-English Harrap’s), he was no longer misreading lines and making idiotic blunders, and bit by bit his versions of Apollinaire and Desnos were beginning to sound like English poems rather than French poems that had been shoved through a linguistic meat grinder and rendered into Fringlish, but they weren’t quite ready yet, there was still work to be done in order to make them right, and he didn’t want to knock on the door until he felt good about every word in every line of those lyric glories, which he admired too deeply not to give them everything he had, again and again everything he had. It wasn’t clear that the magazine would want to publish translations, but it would be worth making the effort to find out, since the Review had attracted some of the most interesting freshmen he had met so far, and by becoming part of it himself Ferguson would be able to join forces with poets and prose writers such as David Zimmer, Daniel Quinn, Jim Freeman, Adam Walker, and Peter Aaron, all of whom were in various classes with him, and he had seen enough of them in the past six weeks to know how intelligent and well-read they were, beginning writers who seemed to have the stuff to go on and become real poets and novelists one day, and not only were they smart, ferociously gifted first-year pukes, but each one of them had made it through Freshman Orientation Week without ever putting on his beanie.